Nimrod wrote:Yep... we're looking at it and revisiting the old standards that we've lived by for the last decade.

Feel free to chime in and debate the issue. We want solutions, not complaining about how things are now, please.

These are actually the standards we've lived by for 4.5 years. Atonement Beta introduced guns(which archery code is, in all but name). That was 4.5 years ago, which I only know because it was two weeks before I got married.

I also only know that because I had to ask my wife how long we've been married.

Archery is different from a gun in many ways. Essentially we've converted single-shot breech-loading rifles into longbows, crossbows, and flatbows. A breech-loading rifle will get around 8-10 shots per minute, when trained. A longbowmen didn't tend to shoot more than 6 per minute, and that was 'pretty fast.' So we're already shooting way faster than we should, and we can all agree we're AIMING longbows at the speed we aimed rifles...which is again way faster than we should.

Ontop of that, we don't have the shield-blocking standard we had in SoI. This is without arguing damage, which I'll do later.

Nimrod wrote:FYI - We do allow and encourage our staff members to play characters in the game. Most of them do. We work extremely hard to keep these characters on the down low and try to choose supporting roles wherever we can. Though staff are free to reach for bigger and better things, just like our players are.

as long as staff don't abuse their powers to give their PC boosted stats and skills or unobtainable gear, I doubt many people in the community will take issue with this. The way I see it, when staff also play the game they create, they will have an easier time of spotting what the game needs, that might not be as obvious from a staff perspective.

Nimrod wrote:FYI - The 40 dam 40 bleeder that Ancalagon mentioned above was a head shot inflicted by a staffer with perfect stats and maxed out skills. It -is- possible at this time for some shots to be pretty terrible, especially with the damage bonuses for a head shot and crit-hit bonus.

Even unskilled newbies have the potential to land headshot instant kill crits. Having perfect stats ands kills just removes the luck factor of it.

Nimrod wrote:The numbers that I see in the damage seems fairly representative of what an arrow would do to a human. What I do not think is representative of real life in any way though, at this time, is the range that we allow. Currently a long bow can shoot at you from three rooms away, and a shortbow can span two rooms. Given that the room size in Mirkwood is 1 mile square, that's an extremely long shot.

The question is whether you really want that level of realism in a game. It's realistic that getting shot by an arrow would kill you instantly, or very quickly, but I don't think anyone will have much fun getting killed that way. I'd love it if the bleeding could be removed, and the arrows just did regular damage.

Nimrod wrote:By 'standards' I meant the way we, as staff, and players, treat archery as a whole. i.e. how we deal with the differences in code vs. reality (how we defend being able to shoot an arrow 3 miles).

The rest of the code stuff, you're right on with. Thanks.

For rooms representing a mile, we should also take into account just how darn fast someone can travel through a room. I feel like the 2-3 range on bows is practical for open fields because players can close that 3 room distance in a reasonable amount of time. If some coder could figure out a way to give bows -1 range or a major aim penalty when shooting into forest areas to represent the density of mirkwood, that would be really cool.

Alternatively, we could alter the time it takes to travel room to room and make it realistic. walk speed represents a brisk pace, so around 5 miles per hour. If the game is a 4:1 time speed and each room is a mile, it would take about 0.05 hours to travel room to room, or 3 minutes (assuming my tired self didn't snarfagle up the math). The game world would definitely need to be compacted down to size if it took 3 minutes to travel room to room, or players would die of boredom every bog run.

Nimrod wrote:We've always juggled reality vs. playability when it comes to bows and just accepted the old standards. Perhaps it's time for us to re-visit these standards. I invite you all to open a thread and discuss the issue and if you come up with an acceptable solution, I'd be more than happy to consider it. Heck... I think I'll start the thread myself.

that's a great idea. Archery could really use some attention to get brought into balance with the rest of the game, and made so that it's easier to incorporate into roleplay in pvp encounters. Now that I think of it, this has been discussed by players and staff even since old SOI, where staff had intended to make it so bows could only be shot within the room, but you had a long delay to approach an enemy before you were allowed to initiate close combat.

Last edited by radioactivejesus on Mon Jul 27, 2015 1:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.

A really bad sword with a short blade lies here. look sword This sword hardly even a sword. It's kind of really just a piece of metal bent like a sword. Its blade is rather short. Kind of pathetic, really.

Please don't remove bleeding from archery unless it's just against people wearing armor. It's a big part of what supports hunting code, and would make it painfully difficult to hunt basic animals.

Last edited by Real on Mon Jul 27, 2015 1:52 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Everything gets smaller now the further that I goTowards the mouth and the reunion of the known and the unknownConsider yourself lucky if you think of it as homeYou can move mountains with your misery if you don't

tehkory wrote:all agree we're AIMING longbows at the speed we aimed rifles...which is again way faster than we should.

bows can actually be fired pretty quickly, the speed you take aim and shoot is pretty well represented by ingame code. When you use a bow, you simultaneously raise the bow at the same time you draw back, loosing the arrow is more a matter of reflex and muscle memory than the careful aiming of a firearm. This is because the longer you hold a bow at full draw, the more tired your muscles become, and the wobblier your aim will be. Imagine trying to hold up 50-150 pounds of weight with 3 fingers for an extended period of time. Where the slow firing rate of an archer comes from, is the time it takes to retrieve an arrow from your quiver and nock it. After that, all you really need to do is pull back and release in order to shoot something.

A really bad sword with a short blade lies here. look sword This sword hardly even a sword. It's kind of really just a piece of metal bent like a sword. Its blade is rather short. Kind of pathetic, really.

Real wrote:Please don't remove bleeding from archery unless it's just against people wearing armor. It's a big part of what supports hunting code, and would make it painfully difficult to hunt basic animals.

the way I see it, bleeding levels should be the same as a spear. high moderate damage or worse causes bleeding. Against a prey animal with a suitable broadhead arrow, I figure nearly every shot that lands to the body or head should be at least moderate/severe.

A really bad sword with a short blade lies here. look sword This sword hardly even a sword. It's kind of really just a piece of metal bent like a sword. Its blade is rather short. Kind of pathetic, really.

This sounds a lot like just nerfing archery into the ground...It would make it way more difficult to play a scout type if you can't snipe mobiles from a distance. Sometimes skirmish tactics are all that work.

A warg can cross that three miles in no time. About 2-3 seconds if he's shot at, and almost instantly if you shoot something in an adjacent room. That's a pretty fast warg, so I dunno if reducing range would be entirely fair on that front unless we want to reduce archery's viability across the board and marginalize it as a skillset.

Give armor much higher resistance to arrows, I think would be the best course of action. That way natural AC won't destroy its viability if it's already weak, but players won't be so vulnerable to a gank.

Everything gets smaller now the further that I goTowards the mouth and the reunion of the known and the unknownConsider yourself lucky if you think of it as homeYou can move mountains with your misery if you don't

Real wrote:This sounds a lot like just nerfing archery into the ground...It would make it way more difficult to play a scout type if you can't snipe mobiles from a distance. Sometimes skirmish tactics are all that work.

A warg can cross that three miles in no time. About 2-3 seconds if he's shot at, and almost instantly if you shoot something in an adjacent room. That's a pretty fast warg, so I dunno if reducing range would be entirely fair on that front unless we want to reduce archery's viability across the board and marginalize it as a skillset.

Give armor much higher resistance to arrows, I think would be the best course of action. That way natural AC won't destroy its viability if it's already weak, but players won't be so vulnerable to a gank.

yep. Only way to justify reducing range across the board would be to make the time it takes to travel room to room more realistic, and that would make travel boring as hell.In thickly forested rooms range could definitely be reduced, though.

A really bad sword with a short blade lies here. look sword This sword hardly even a sword. It's kind of really just a piece of metal bent like a sword. Its blade is rather short. Kind of pathetic, really.

Real wrote:Please don't remove bleeding from archery unless it's just against people wearing armor. It's a big part of what supports hunting code, and would make it painfully difficult to hunt basic animals.

Kithrater added double bleeding against mobiles already. I imagine that change is still in place, and works wonders. It works even more given that you can use broadhead ammo against them to increase it even mor

radioactivejesus wrote:

tehkory wrote:all agree we're AIMING longbows at the speed we aimed rifles...which is again way faster than we should.

bows can actually be fired pretty quickly, the speed you take aim and shoot is pretty well represented by ingame code. When you use a bow, you simultaneously raise the bow at the same time you draw back, loosing the arrow is more a matter of reflex and muscle memory than the careful aiming of a firearm. This is because the longer you hold a bow at full draw, the more tired your muscles become, and the wobblier your aim will be. Imagine trying to hold up 50-150 pounds of weight with 3 fingers for an extended period of time. Where the slow firing rate of an archer comes from, is the time it takes to retrieve an arrow from your quiver and nock it. After that, all you really need to do is pull back and release in order to shoot something.

Again, I already noted that a skilled longbow user firing en-masse is less accurate and more time-consuming than a skilled, breech-loading rifleman firing en-masse. It's not much less accurate or much less time-consuming, but it's definitely a hack-job currently. It's worth noting.

Also, mile-per-room is silly and dumb. It means that the woods north of Utterby represent a square mileage of roughly double that of the island of Manhatttan.

But the two big things I would lobby for in archery code:All armor gets a moderate boost in AC against arrowsShields give a reliable chance of blocking archers, maybe a deflect roll

Those two should fix it in relation to PVP. As far as PVE is concerned archery feels perfect at the moment, at least to me. There's a learning curve and then you can use it to creatively get past obstacles in the wilderness.

I'm not opposed to reducing the bleeding but keep in mind that it can take quite a few hits to get something like a giant boar bleeding out. If that makes them tanks and it's what's intended, by all means, but it takes quite a degree of effort to kill a lot of these more rugged mobs.

Everything gets smaller now the further that I goTowards the mouth and the reunion of the known and the unknownConsider yourself lucky if you think of it as homeYou can move mountains with your misery if you don't

You actually have that first bit backwards. A bow is point and shoot, while at long ranges a rifleman has to take the time to sight in his iron sights properly, account for windage and line up the front and rear sight before firing. Archers definitely require a -lot- more skill/training, however.https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=207&v=HagCuGXJgUsfast forward to 2:20. As you can see, once he has his arrow nocked he spends about 1 and a half seconds to draw, aim and loose it. The main delay is in the time it took him to nock an arrow, not to aim. Holding your bow fully drawn no longer than you need to and taking aim quickly is a skill practiced heavily by all archers out of necessity, otherwise they'll tire themselves out and fatigue their muscles.

A really bad sword with a short blade lies here. look sword This sword hardly even a sword. It's kind of really just a piece of metal bent like a sword. Its blade is rather short. Kind of pathetic, really.

end of the day though, there's only two things that truly needs to be done for archery to balance it out.

Make shields block arrows like in old SOI.Make arrows do primarily HP damage, and bleed damage comparative to spears, like on old SOI.

edit: just timed it, and it takes approx 8 seconds to load and get fully aimed at an opponent 1 room away with adroit bow/aim skill. And that is with near instant input commands, when you're not prepared for it and need to scan out your opponent things would like to take longer. Someone would have to test again with an amateur skilled PC, but it seems like the time required would be about true to real life for an archer attempting to loose arrows at a fairly fast pace.

A really bad sword with a short blade lies here. look sword This sword hardly even a sword. It's kind of really just a piece of metal bent like a sword. Its blade is rather short. Kind of pathetic, really.

I remember in Atonement playing with a certain horned mutant that made "ballistic" shields. The craft for them was different than regular shields. I'm thinking that in SOI and for player longevity the heavier 10 lb craftable (soon to be craftable, not up on what's standard these days) should be flagged with this "ballistic" type.

Things that made me smile:

Icarus wrote:I'm going to kill the next character I see doing stuff like that. I'm not joking.

Justanothacivy wrote:I remember in Atonement playing with a certain horned mutant that made "ballistic" shields. The craft for them was different than regular shields. I'm thinking that in SOI and for player longevity the heavier 10 lb craftable (soon to be craftable, not up on what's standard these days) should be flagged with this "ballistic" type.

I remember the bleeding/bind code being stressful & confusing for combat-newbies at imminent risk of losing a pc. Unfortunately, I don't quite remember the details - something about re-typing "bind" resetting one's timer, perhaps? Or repeatedly seeing "you continue attempting to bind ..." with no indicator of progress (and a steady loss of hp)? Or something about having to type "stop" first in certain cases?

EltanimRas wrote:I remember the bleeding/bind code being stressful & confusing for combat-newbies at imminent risk of losing a pc. Unfortunately, I don't quite remember the details - something about re-typing "bind" resetting one's timer, perhaps? Or repeatedly seeing "you continue attempting to bind ..." with no indicator of progress (and a steady loss of hp)? Or something about having to type "stop" first in certain cases?

When you bleed, type bleed once. Once you get an echo back that you've stopped or partially stemmed the bleeding, feel free to type it again. That's the rule.

The exception to the rule is that sometimes bind breaks, and nobody knows why, and it's never been fixed, and you don't know except by experience how long a given wound will take to bind, and it's rather difficult to get around the bug and nobody knows how for sure and exceptions to the rules are dumb but that's bugs for you and god help you maybe type bind again or maybe type stop and bind or maybe just pray someone else is there...

Or when all else fails use a shitty bandage and TREAT the wound. That'll take a while and you'll probably die if it's a really bad bleeder but if bind isn't working and you're sure then it's better than nothing and ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. That's all I got for you.

A trained bowman can get off ten aimed shots in under a minute.A crossbow man can get two (winch, goat's foot) to six (manual pull) shots in the same time.Time in Middle Earth moves at an accelerated pace.If anything rate of fire is too slow.

cfelch wrote:A trained bowman can get off ten aimed shots in under a minute.A crossbow man can get two (winch, goat's foot) to six (manual pull) shots in the same time.Time in Middle Earth moves at an accelerated pace.If anything rate of fire is too slow.

Cross bows are also much easier to use.Aka bonuses to skill.

having a combat speed that was 4 times as fast as it is now would be pretty unfun. I like to imagine in my mind that the time speed gets slowed down to a 1:1 once any sort of combat begins, since all of a sudden every second can mean life or death.

A really bad sword with a short blade lies here. look sword This sword hardly even a sword. It's kind of really just a piece of metal bent like a sword. Its blade is rather short. Kind of pathetic, really.

cfelch wrote:A trained bowman can get off ten aimed shots in under a minute.A crossbow man can get two (winch, goat's foot) to six (manual pull) shots in the same time.Time in Middle Earth moves at an accelerated pace.If anything rate of fire is too slow.

Cross bows are also much easier to use.Aka bonuses to skill.

having a combat speed that was 4 times as fast as it is now would be pretty unfun. I like to imagine in my mind that the time speed gets slowed down to a 1:1 once any sort of combat begins, since all of a sudden every second can mean life or death.

Oh I agree, unfun in the extreme.But realistic and gritty.Charging at a trained archer should be suicide for 1 person for every 10-20 yards of ground that needs be covered.

As for the presumed 1:1 time ratio for those infinite moments.... very poetic, but not reflected in code one iota.

Ah! Some lovely suggestions, everyone, thank you! Apologies for not being more active in this thread, the last couple days have been pretty busy for me behind the scenes (and in another thread). I'm going to ask our weapon/armor admins if they could take some time to read through this thread and see if they can work up a proposal that would fit.

Archery is one of those things you either love for hate, so you're either wanting it nerfed, or you want it left alone, depending on what kind of character you play.

I'd like to also take in to account how it affects roleplay and pvp. Specifically I want to make sure that we can try to make it so that melee patrols aren't always forced to just close with the archer and engage immediately as a defense against further arrows.

RJ is intimately familiar with the melee side of things, so he'll have some relevant information on that side of things. I'm hoping that we can hash out some common ground so we don't make scouts totally useless while still allowing melee groups the opportunity to roleplay without having to risk death from afar.

Thanks everyone for taking the time to provide all this input. It's really appreciated.

-Nim

The greatest enemy to propaganda or even counter-propaganda is open, unadulterated channels of free opinion.

Somebody wrote:If some coder could figure out a way to give bows -1 range or a major aim penalty when shooting into forest areas to represent the density of mirkwood, that would be really cool.

There are actually cover flags for rooms that allow for scenery and stuff in the room to obstruct the use of ranged weapons. The actual messages might need editing to work with bows, but the stuff should already be there as far as I know.

As far as bows and balance and whatnot, assuming that they're more or less on-par with guns, as I've experienced them, they're actually not that great considering how quickly something can close the distance or move into another room in the time it takes you to aim. The high damage and bleed compensates for that, and provides some benefit to hiding, laying in wait, preparing, etc. when playing a ranged character. The only real problem with ranged weapons on the engine isn't so much that they're powerful or weak or what-have-you, so much as they're not great for RP. The codebase doesn't have a way to communicate over distance. There's no way to point your bow at somebody and say 'HEY DON'T MOVE OR I'LL SHOOT YOU' and even if there was, they could just move anyhow, and then you couldn't shoot them. And if you just shoot them, you're kind of a bad person for jumping to code without RPing, even if you're the type of person who would normally RP first. Combat in general on the RPI engine isn't great for roleplay, but ranged and stealth combat in particular are horrible for it.